Children of Paradise (8 page)

There were reasons for that. Khomeini wanted the shah extradited to Iran to stand trial for crimes against his people. But even more than they wanted to see him face the firing squad, many Iranian revolutionaries simply didn’t want the shah in the United States. They feared a reprisal of the 1953 coup: perhaps the shah had gone to his North American ally not for medical care but to regroup with his CIA sponsors and plan his return to the throne.

On November 4, 1979, some four hundred revolutionary students breached the walls of the gigantic American embassy compound in central Tehran. The students, under the direction of a group calling itself Students Following the Imam’s Line, stormed the embassy and took some fifty-one Americans hostage. Their demand was that the United States extradite the shah.

Khomeini had not ordered the embassy seizure; by all accounts it took him by surprise. But over Bazargan’s objections, the ayatollah gave the
students his blessing. The Islamic Republican Party folded the hostage takers into its apparatus, ensuring their political prominence for decades to come.

As much as the seizure of the American embassy would set the course of the Islamic Republic’s foreign policy, it was also a brutal gambit in Iran’s domestic politics. The radical clerics were through with Bazargan. To force him out, they had only to turn up the political temperature past the point that was tolerable for a man of his temperament. The hostage taking accomplished this. It also allowed the Islamists to seize the anti-imperialist ground from under the secular left, spectacularly outflanking Iran’s opposition of longest standing.

Bazargan had favored cordial relations with the United States. He and members of his government had maintained contact with the American diplomats in what they considered the ordinary course of their duties. Now their foreign policy was finished and they had lost control of the domestic situation entirely. Bazargan tendered his resignation.
In his final televised address, Bazargan shared with the public his fear that in the future, the sovereignty of the Iranian people might be supplanted by the rule of the clergy.

A month later, the new constitution, complete with
velayat-e faqih
, was
ratified by a popular referendum in which fewer than 16 million Iranians voted.
Khomeini publicly averred that he would exercise his vast authority only rarely, and only to prevent deviation from Islam. In actuality, the decade that followed would consolidate one of the more unaccountable and autocratic regimes of its time.

• • •

T
HE
I
SLAMIC
R
EPUBLIC OF
I
RAN
held its first presidential election in 1980. Ayatollah Khomeini cast his weight behind an independent candidate, Abolhassan Bani-Sadr, a self-styled radical Islamic economist with a Groucho Marx mustache. Bani-Sadr had assisted Khomeini in France and then served on the Revolutionary Council. He won in a landslide, for lack of any convincing opposition.

The new president was not the high-minded liberal Bazargan had been.
He was a man of his extreme times, determined to stand up to his political enemies whatever it took. His brazen self-confidence almost immediately rankled the clerics of the Islamic Republican Party. “
The president should be in charge,” Bani-Sadr declared, and he spoke of “the final defeat” of the clergy, the dissolution of the
komiteh
s, and the elimination of competing power centers.

Ayatollah Beheshti and the Islamic Republican Party were determined to stymie Bani-Sadr and to convince Khomeini that the elected president was an enemy of the state. The president’s antagonists declared Bani-Sadr power-mad, “egocentric,” and an “
enemy of the clergy.” They called him “
Bazargan with a different face,” grumbled about incipient liberalism, and admonished the new president to go “
along with the revolution.” They used their parliamentary majority to isolate Bani-Sadr within his own cabinet, appointing nearly all the ministers from their party’s own ranks and forcing the president to take a prime minister who locked him in constant battle.

As if Bani-Sadr didn’t have enough problems, on September 22, 1980, Iraq invaded Iran. The two countries had irritated each other for some time with provocations and minor conflicts. But now Saddam Hussein decided to take advantage of Iran’s isolation and revolutionary upheaval in his quest for control of the Shatt al-Arab waterway.
This was no minor border skirmish. The Iraqi dictator sent twenty-two divisions into Iranian territory in one of the biggest military operations since World War II.

There was no international outcry. American officials would later recall greeting the outbreak of the Iran-Iraq War with something close to schadenfreude. Iraq was a Soviet client and Iran was all but at war with the United States, so long as it held American diplomats hostage. The embassy seizure had placed the Islamic Republic beyond the pale of international concern. But Iran’s revolutionaries understood the global silence differently. If they had always suspected that the international order was stacked against them, now they knew it.

War did not unite Iran’s political factions so much as it further divided them. Bani-Sadr argued that the students should release the American hostages so that Iran could buy spare military parts from the West. He called
for an end to the ideological purges in the army, which needed its commanders more than ever. But to Bani-Sadr’s great frustration, the hostage crisis dragged on and the military purges continued.

Bizarrely, by the lights of most constitutions, Iran’s president became the outspoken leader of its opposition. He rallied liberals and parts of the left to his side, along with the
Mojahedin-e Khalq, whose ranks were swelling with young people, many of them teenagers. Bani-Sadr used his newspaper to decry the revolutionary regime’s violence—its reliance on torture, censorship, assassination plots, and more. “
This is not a republic of which I am proud to be president,” he concluded.
He even asked Khomeini to assure him that if anything should happen to him, his wife and children would not be hurt. Khomeini did not respond directly. But in time he cautioned the president that he should distance himself from the Mojahedin.

The Mojahedin were the best leverage Bani-Sadr had, and he was not willing to give them up. Starting in February 1981,
demonstrators clashed in the streets, with hezbollahis, as pro-regime militants were often called, armed with clubs, knives, and pistols arrayed against the Mojahedin and other supporters of the president. When Khomeini appointed a commission to settle the matter, it was stacked against the president and stripped Bani-Sadr of his remaining authority. The clerics shut down Bani-Sadr’s newspaper, arrested his aides, forbade him to give interviews to the foreign press, and finally, in June, removed him from the presidency with a parliamentary vote of no confidence.

“
I am very sorry,” Khomeini said when the warrant was issued for Bani-Sadr’s arrest. “I tried to avoid . . . such a dismissal.” But “there were [foreign] hands at work and wolves among these people who did not allow us to avoid what we had intended to avoid.”

The Islamic Republic’s first elected president became a fugitive inside Iran, his whereabouts unknown. The prime minister who had been Bani-Sadr’s adversary now governed. The revolution, the clerics told the public, had been won in order to build an Islamic state that was neither liberal nor democratic. Bani-Sadr, meanwhile, signed a covenant with the Mojahedin,
pledging to overthrow the government and replace it with a “
democratic Islamic Republic.”

Iran erupted in something very like a civil war. The Mojahedin and allied leftists fought the Revolutionary Guards behind barricades made from burning buses, tires, trees, and barrels, holding out up to eight hours at a stretch. These were not the genteel liberals of Bazargan’s cadre; they included revolutionary street toughs, bomb makers, and assassins.

On June 27, 1981, a bomb planted in a tape recorder exploded at a crowded southern Tehran mosque where Ali Khamenei was speaking, permanently injuring his right arm and damaging his voice through wounds to his neck and throat. “
Thank God the enemies of Islam are made up of idiots,” Khomeini said by way of consolation. “They drive the people to stronger unity with whatever schemes and intrigues they hatch.” Another bomb exploded in a Tehran square and a third, found on a city street, was defused.

But the most spectacular attacks came the next day, on June 28, when the Islamic Republican Party convened for its weekly meeting. Two bombs, never claimed by any of the opposition groups, exploded in the party headquarters, one in a garbage can near a podium where Ayatollah Beheshti was speaking, and the other in the audience. The explosion brought the two-story building to the ground, twisting the steel beams of the roof and killing at least seventy officials and functionaries, including Beheshti himself. Two months later, on August 30, a bomb ripped through the office of the prime minister during a meeting of the defense council, killing the prime minister and four others.

For the clerics, who had also recently put down a coup attempt from inside the armed forces, coexistence was definitively impossible. Bani-Sadr and the Mojahedin had to be eliminated from the political scene, and to do it the Islamic Republican Party unleashed a campaign of terror. Days after the blast that killed the prime minister, the judiciary authorized mass arrests and began executing oppositionists by firing squad. Firefights between the Mojahedin and the Revolutionary Guards intensified, particularly in the south of Tehran. Bani-Sadr and the leadership of the Mojahedin
escaped to France, but altogether an estimated 2,665 of their followers—Mojahedin, Kurdish nationalists, leftists, and nationalists—were executed between June and November 1981. The deaths, declared the chief prosecutor, “
are not merely permissible; they are necessary.”

• • •

A
LIREZA
H
AGHIGHI WAS A SURVIVOR.
One after another in those years, the young men he knew seemed to vanish. Some were executed, others killed in battle. He had a friend who was a brilliant physics student. After the revolution, this friend joined the Revolutionary Guard. A former SAVAK officer was brought in to educate his unit; outraged, Alireza’s friend left the Revolutionary Guard and joined the Mojahedin in search of a truer radicalism. He was killed in the turmoil surrounding Bani-Sadr. This young scientist had been used, Alireza felt, and disposed of. None of the armed factions cared about his education, his talents, his future promise.

Alireza was only sixteen when the revolution came. He intended for university to catapult him out of southern Shiraz, through his activist milieu, and into the center of the new mainstream. But the year he earned his high school diploma, there were no universities to enter. Starting in 1980, at Khomeini’s behest, hezbollahis seized the university campuses to purge the faculties and student bodies and Islamize the curricula. The universities were closed for three years. Along with his entire cohort, Alireza found himself at loose ends. He might have studied abroad, but his mother could not afford it. He might have volunteered for the war, but his father beat him to it and asked Alireza instead to mind his shop while he was at the front.

And so Alireza disappeared into the Shiraz bazaar. Over his father’s objections, he set up a desk in the shop and stocked it with books. Between customers, he read. The war was transforming Shiraz in ways Alireza did not approve of. Young men from Abadan, an oil-producing border city besieged in 1980, poured into Shiraz looking for girls, even while Iraqis occupied their homes. Alireza suspected that they cared little about the war. One knew a true revolutionary, he theorized, by his choices.
Revolution was like love: between love and self-interest, the true lover chose love. But the young men who took war and revolution as seriously as Alireza did were mainly hezbollahis, foot soldiers of
velayat-e faqih
. From them, too, Alireza felt distant. He still belonged to the group of intellectuals inspired by Shariati. It was a radical group, both Islamist and egalitarian, but it was occupied mainly with producing newspapers, a voluminous literature penned by an industrious few.

Alireza had not vested himself in history only to pass his youth in the Shiraz bazaar. In 1979, Khomeini ordered the creation of a vast volunteer militia, called the Basij, to be made up of men above and below the age of conscription, as well as of women. Alireza was still seventeen in 1980, a year younger than draft age for the regular army, and so he reported to a training camp for the Basij. The instruction was part physical, part ideological. The war with Iraq, Alireza believed, transcended the factional politics that divided him from the Hezbollahis who populated the Basij. But those running the training camp saw things differently. One recognized Alireza and accused him of infiltrating the Basij only to spy on it. Alireza was expelled.

He joined the navy. To enter the military during wartime allowed him an honorable discharge from that other war—the one among political adversaries who saw their young followers as cannon fodder. From the navy base, politics unfolded vaguely and afar. Alireza and the other enlisted men could not go into the city or mix with civilians, and they read only the official newspapers. Later he would imagine that if he had not been on that base in 1981, he might have been arrested or worse. Instead, he shipped out to the front just in time to see the end of the war’s decisive battle at Khorramshahr.

It was Khorramshahr, just fifteen kilometers north of Abadan on the Shatt al-Arab, that Iraq first besieged in September 1980. The city fell after thirty-six days of heavy artillery pounding, a battle that quickly became revolutionary legend as a ragged Basij and Revolutionary Guard force unsuccessfully defended the city from within its mosque. Under Iraqi occupation, Khorramshahr was a ghost town, half razed, graffitied, and bullet-scarred. Iraqi soldiers used photos of Khomeini for target practice. It was
the fall of 1981 before the Iranian armed forces broke the yearlong siege of Abadan and then, at the end of a monthlong campaign in May of 1982, regained Khorramshahr.